How did IPAs become so popular?

Besides the obvious answer “they taste good”, I think many “craft” brewers focused on them as a way to differentiate their products from what was commercially available.

As brewing techniques and consumer tastes evolved, it became a very good palette for brewers to showcase their skills and breweries to establish a stylistic identity. Locally, I could tell you by taste if a beer was made by El Segundo, Monkish, Hopsaint....etc....they are distinct

 

"No one" ? Damn, when did you take the survey? I hope you didn't call my landline 'cause we don't answer unless we know you and you start to leave a message. (Of course, I don't answer the cell, either).

Been checking date codes since I began buying beer "seriously" in the 1970s - I read some of the ads and promo material, though not quite as far back as some of these:
Date Coding

 

Lord Chesterfield for the win!

https://www.beeradvocate.com/community/threads/no-love-for-american-adjunct-lagers.313784/

Cheers!

 

Its funny you mention "white zinfandel" because I STILL have to explain that "No ma'am, the pink wine with the word "Rosé" on the label does not taste like roses."

 

Hahaha! That's hilarious. Years ago, I guess it's decades now, when white zinfandel was popular I was having lunch at what seemed like a pretty upscale place with a good wine list. I asked the server if he had a red zinfandel, rather than looking through the wine book, and he laughed at me slightly and said, "We have a WHITE zinfandel" as if I had no clue what I was talking about.

 

I think the rise in IPA popularity coincided with the hop race. Around 10 years ago “Craft Beer” consumers were looking for the most hops for the money, IPAs filled that need and won the race. Not long after this, other styles were given a hop boost to compete with IPAs, e.g. hoppy brown ales, pale, amber/reds, etc.

 

They are susceptible to an extreme amount of variation in sweetness (malty or dry), fruitiness (citrus or tropical or....), booziness (session, single, double, etc), appearance (crystal clear all the way to orange-juice opaque), and a variety of other variables. In other words, there is likely some kind of overall appearance/flavor/aroma profile somewhere out there in IPA land that people will like, even if they would start from a "IPA's aren't really my thing" standpoint.

 

Bingo. Lots of breweries are calling beers "IPA" that dont come close to the original IPA style, because they know it will sell better. Sour IPAs, brut IPAs, fruit IPAs - if they called them "sour ale" or "extra dry ale" or something else, they wont sell as well as if they carried the IPA moniker. Nothing wrong with any of these beers, in my opinion- i just dont consider them really to be IPAs.

 

During the 60s I stumbled onto the odd Ballentine, and in the early 70's had some IPAs in London and later that decade a few in Canada but I think the dawn of craft beer really started things. At the end of the 70s and early 80s most of the how to brew beer books were from England, much of the ingredients came from England and English Ales were a hell of a lot easier to brew in a waste basket in your basement than a lager. A whole generation of home brewers - many of whom became professional brewers grew up on English Ales and IPAs. At the time people brewed pale ales to hook the uninitiated and then every one else drank IPAs when they weren't drinking stouts or brown ales. IPAs were popular because they were in or blood and they were not Bud, Miller Lite, Coors, etc. It took the rest of the country a decade or so to catch on.

 

Most people would agree that's true - and it explains why there are so many IPAs of a variety of sub-styles that logically shouldn't be called India Pale Ale at all.

But knowing a beer labeled IPA "will sell better" doesn't at all explain why they're popular, it only verifies that they are popular.

 

I went away from IPAs for a while when they were all west coast style and becoming over hopped. But once the New England IPA style was dialed in, it opened up a new world of how you can craft IPAs.

 

I was the same way for awhile, although I do think for awhile there was a real "trying to win an IBU prize" issue taking hold. As a result, I walked away cold turkey from IPA's of any kind for at least two years. Over the last year or so, I've given them a shot again--even the danker offerings that would fit the "West Coast" classification, and have found them better on the whole. It could just be that I got "burned out." Or, maybe I didn't give my palate enough time to acquire the taste.

 

Well yes, I'm sure SOME people checked dates back in 2004. I can give you a call from a landline using a rotary phone if you want to chat about it.

But checking freshness dates wasn't nearly as obsessive an activity in 2004 as it appears it is today.

And at the very least, people didn't obsess as much over drinking beer bottled that day/week/month. If you got a two month old IPA that was totally fine.

And not nearly as many breweries dated their beers, and if they did, many of them had "best by" dates rather than a "bottled on" date. Sure the bigger companies did like Sierra Nevada with Julian dating, and Sam Adams with the notched months on the label for example.

Did Stone date their bottles back then?

 

I've been drinking craft beer since 1996, and I recall my first IPA tasting like grapefruit juice mixed with beer. I didn't like it, and the next few IPAs that I tried were similar in taste. However, I eventually began to like IPAs as I tried others and discovered different flavors by different hops being used. Then I began to like the ones that I had tried at first. Point is, IPAs probably are disliked by 90% of new craft drinkers until they also experience enough of them. Then many new craft enthusuasts came into the culture in the early/mid-2000s which provided a growth in the demand for craft beers, and shortly after that IPAs grew in demand when all of these newbies realized, like I did after a couple years, that they liked IPAs. Hence greater popularity and demand produced rapid growth in the style.

But no one in this thread has brought up the fact that the development of better tasting hops was a big factor too. I don't know when a hop like Citra was first introduced, but I think it was in short supply and used in only a few IPAs or Pale Ales until growers could catch up with the early popular demand for it. (Other popular hops were developed around the same time too.) As more and more IPAs were released with Citra, demand skyrocketed for beers that used it (or those other popular hops). I'm going to guess that Pliny and other west coast IPAs were created around that time frame too.

Then came the juicy hop combinations that are used in NEIPAs, so another rapid growth in the IPA family is now occurring.

 

Another overnight success ...25+ years in the making .

How/why?
1) By not being bland.
2) By not smelling/tasting like the morning after the night before . (No corn )

I would suggest IPAs became successful because of pale ales.
Sierra Nevada Pale ale, especially. (I drank a fair amount of the now-retired Ithaca Pale Ale)
Then people went further.....& further....& further.....& here we are.

 

https://www.morebeer.com/articles/homebrew_beer_hops

According to this website (which is a pretty huge list of hops most of which I'd never heard of) Citra showed up in 2007 (Mosaic in 2012).

 

Pliny the Elder debuted in 2001 and features Amarillo, Centennial, CTZ, and Simcoe hops.

I did bring up the "better tasting hops" indirectly when I talked about low-bitterness IPAs and "juiciness." I personally don't consider those hops, as they tend to be employed in contemporary IPAs, better-tasting -- I'd tend instead to call them "dumbed down" -- but they certainly hit the sweet spot (pun intended) of the typical present-day beer drinker. They're sine qua non of IPAs' continued craft beer ubiquity in a 2019 market dominated by less experienced and less adventurous imbibers than those who went out of their way to seek out craft beer when it was a more niche product and held little social cachet.

 

It seemed like it was a month after admonishing IPA that rebel IPA was released.

 

I remember the first time I saw Sculpin in the store a long time ago, I split the case of bombers with my bro got home and drank some and thought meh it's alright. Then I checked the date it was not that fresh..

I didn't start to obsess about freshness till this point and remember many cases of Two Hearted bottled within a week or two of delivery. I wish I could still find it like that.